Beautiful Blood (13 page)

“Did you expect me to put on a show for you? Wail and tear my hair? I’m not a fool. I knew from the outset that you might be carrying tales about me back to Breque.”

“I see. You were being duplicitous as well.”

“Naturally I protected myself. I don’t know whether I would call that duplicity. If I had mentioned my suspicions concerning you, it would have ended our relationship. I wasn’t prepared for it to end.”

Rain plip-plopped on the scales, dripping from the edge of the wing, and an assortment of trivial creatures were poking their heads, feelers and other protuberances up between Griaule’s scales. Amelita absorbed what he had said and then made a slight gesture with her head that might have been a nod signaling acceptance.

“I have one question regarding Breque,” he said. “Did you ever withhold information from me that would have implicated him in Ludie’s murder?”

“I found nothing to implicate him,” she said. “That scarcely constitutes proof of innocence, but if he was involved, he left no trace.”

Rosacher could not hide his disappointment and she put a hand on his arm, saying, “I’ll keep tryng to find a connection, if you wish.”

“No, just keep doing what you’re doing.”

“What do you mean?”

“Keep turning in your reports to Breque.”

A bewildered expression crossed her face. “You want me to continue deceiving him?”

“Your deceit protects us. If you were to go to Breque and tell him you could no longer work for him, he would simply replace you with someone whom I might not be able to detect.”

Seeing that she was displeased, he said, “You became entangled in this web when you embarked upon a course of deception. It’s going to take some time for you to free yourself.”

“And so, in order to ‘free myself,’ I must cease being Breque’s creature and become yours? Or have I always been your creature? You knew I was a spy from the outset, didn’t you? You used me!”

“What would you have done in my place? Breque put me in the position of having to defend myself. I blame him, not you.”

A squabbling arose from the nests hanging beneath the edge of the wing, and one of them, large and mud-colored, its bottom shaped roughly like a four-pointed star, swayed back and forth. A spasm of frustration struck through Rosacher and he aimed a punch at the scale whereon he sat, but pulled it before impact, recalling the damage done his hand by similar punches thrown in the past.

“Damn it!” he said. “You’re the most contrary human being I’ve ever come across!”

For all her reaction, he might have spoken under his breath. She stared into the middle distance, giving no sign of noticing the flight of swifts that swooped low across the dragon’s back, passing with a rush of wings a few feet away. Rosacher waited to see how long it would take her to speak, but lost count of the seconds. Three minutes or thereabouts, he reckoned.

“So if we are to continue,” she said, “whatever house we build will rest upon a foundation of lies.”

“That’s all you take from this conversation? That dire prognosis.”

She remained silent and turned her head to the side, away from him, as if something to the south had caught her attention.

“Well,” he said curtly. “At least we have a foundation.”

For the life of him, Rosacher could not fathom why he loved Amelita. In truth, he was unsure that what he felt was love, but he was most certainly obsessed with her. Thanks to mab, every woman was beautiful, but Amelita’s beauty, in his view, was supernal. Each line and curve of her had a sculptural velocity, a flow that led the eye from one place to the next, and whenever she moved it seemed to Rosacher that he had witnessed something wholly of nature, like the movement of wheat in the wind. She was a vigorous and attentive lover, and on those rare occasions when the clouds lifted and her mood brightened, she became vivacious and clever, given to quick-witted repartee; but she was depressed the majority of the time and often he would find her weeping for no reason she could articulate. There was, he thought, a great blank space in his relationship with her, a crucial vacancy that prevented them from perfecting their union. He surmised that the moral and physical rectitude of her childhood was to blame, but since she would speak of it only in the vaguest of generalities, he was unable to connect cause to effect in any practical way and thus incapable of concocting a remedy. As a result, his scrutiny of her grew more focused, more obsessive.

Not long after this conversation, they moved into an apartment atop the House of Griaule, one that until then had been reserved for visiting dignitaries, and there they lived for the next three years. The opulence of the place cheered Amelita. She would wander through the rooms, trailing her hand across the backs of gilt chairs and sofas upholstered with cloth that presented a dragon motif; she would sit and study the ornately worked tops of teak tables inlaid with mother-of-pearl by the light of brass lamps mounted on the walls, and gaze intently at the icy, delicate chandelier in the living room, as if she saw in its prismatic depths a kind of resolution. Rosacher could not be certain that these luxurious appointments actually increased her happiness, but they did appear to lift her out of herself, to satisfy some vital need, for her tears no longer flowed so easily and she developed an interest in the fauna that occupied Griaule—indeed, she began to go for day-long walks about the dragon, sketching the creatures that she spotted (marvelously complicated sketches that displayed a heretofore unexploited talent for art), and collecting them in a folio, along with her written observations. Her favorite room in the apartment was their bedchamber. It was dominated by a richly carved ebony four-poster mounted on a dais, with a painted canopy (more dragons) and peach-colored satin sheets; but the main attraction for Amelita was the carpet, an intricate weave of reds, purples, gray and white imported from Isfahan. The design was partitioned into two large hemispheres like, she said, an ancient map of an imaginary world, and once she had formulated this connection, she broke off her nature walks and would lie in bed all day sketching the fantastic creature with which her mind populated that world. Rosacher did not think this inactivity was good for her health, either mental or physical, and urged her to start walking again; but she would not budge and told him she found this type of art more creative and inspiring, and assured him that she was content. Before too long, however, her bouts of weeping grew more frequent and prolonged, and her moods darkened to the point that he feared she might take her own life. Her face began to betray signs of aging—faint crowsfeet, a worry line on the bridge of the nose—whereas his face, the undamaged portion of it, betrayed none, and he was led to consider the possibility that this discrepancy might be a factor in her despair.

One day while he sat beside a twenty-gallon tub of golden blood in the treatment room, entranced by its shifting patterns, it occurred to him that the reason for his lack of aging might be the massive injection of the dragon’s blood given him by the late Arthur Honeyman. And if such were the case, if a huge dose of the blood ameliorated the signs of aging and, perhaps, increased one’s longevity. If the effect were not peculiar to him, he could give a similar dose to Amelita and, once she became aware of its effect, that might have the secondary effect of enlivening her. None of this struck him with the force of a revelation—they were idle thoughts, merely—but he kept returning to them, re-examining them, and they acquired a revelatory power. Here was the answer to a question he had asked himself for decades: why had Griaule sought to distract him from his work? If he had arrived at this conclusion early on (it seemed impossible now that he had not) and, whether correct or incorrect, that conclusion had become known, there would have been a run on the blood by those desiring a longer prime of life. Despite his vast bulk, Griaule would have been drained, his veins and arteries emptied. Did the fact that the dragon had ceased distracting him from these ideas portend that he was prepared to die, or did he now trust in Rosacher’s devotion and so had offered up the remedy of his blood as a blessing to reward him for his faith? A myriad doctrinal questions attendant on that initial question arose, all of them casting doubt on his basic assumption, but in his eagerness to find a cure for his relationship with Amelita and to bring her the gift of an extended youth, he brushed them aside. That night, as she lay on their bed, naked beneath the peach-colored sheets, he sat next to her and spoke about his experience with the blood and explained what he intended to do, showing her a full syringe. She took the syringe from him and peered at the fluid—in the unsteady lantern light, the dark characters of the blood surfaced and faded with the elusiveness of eels, staying only long enough to give an impression of sinuous vigor before slipping away into their golden medium.

“Is this something you want?” she asked. “Am I not sufficiently beautiful?”

He had expected this kind of joyless reaction and advised her that the blood would not enhance her looks, merely maintain them longer than was usual.

“But is this what
you
want?”

“I thought it would please you,” he said. “Doesn’t every women wish to prolong her beauty?”

“I’ve always been beautiful,” she said. “I think it would be interesting to grow old and wrinkled.”

Impatient with her, he tried to take back the syringe; but she resisted him playfully and tucked the syringe beneath a pillow.

“Prove you love me,” she said. “And I’ll give it back.”

“After all these years,” he said, “I shouldn’t have to prove anything.”

“‘All these years?’” Her playful mien evaporated. “Has it been such a chore? Putting up with me?”

“You know that’s not what I meant.”

She looked at him soberly. “You amaze me, Richard. You continually amaze me.”

He sought to make a joke of her comment. “That’s been my aim.”

“Well, you’ve succeeded. You’re a brothel keeper, a drug dealer, and you’re ruthless in your business practices. You’ve had people murdered. Yet you think of yourself as a good man. Most people are no different. We all engage in that sort of deceit, but we’re not as skilled at it as you. Your sins are so great, yet you hide the fact from yourself so thoroughly! It’s truly remarkable.”

Her words sliced into him and he said, “Damn it, ’lita! Must our pleasure always be held hostage to your morbid outlook on life.”

He made another try for the syringe and she pushed him away, this time with considerable force.

“You’re not a good man,” she said. “You don’t love me…except in the way most people love, and that isn’t really love, but a form of self-aggrandisement. I wish I had your talent for hiding from myself, for ignoring the realities—then I could love you the way you pretend to love me.”

“Then why are you with me? The money…is that it? The power. Do you find it exhilarating?”

“What I find exhilarating is that you’re so adept at deluding yourself, sometimes I’m able to believe the fairy tales you tell yourself.”

He wanted to reject her argument, her characterization of his feelings, but knew that to do so would only anger her further. Even if he submitted to her logic, she would be likely to mine a cause for disagreement from whatever he said.

She pulled back the sheet to expose a creamy thigh and pointed to it with the syringe. “This is where you would inject me?”

“Yes,” he said, encouraged—he thought she was relenting, deciding to relent, to allow them to go forward. “I’ll do it in the big muscle. It’ll sting, and there’ll be a sensation of cold, but that doesn’t last.”

“Apart from you,” she said, “has anyone else been injected with so much of the blood?”

“No, but I’ve adjusted the dose to compensate for your lighter weight. It should be perfectly safe.”

As he said those words, he realized how irresponsible it was not to do some further testing, and he reached again for the syringe; but she blocked him with her knee and jammed the needle home, thumbing down the plunger.

“Let’s see,” she said, and appeared on the verge of saying more, but the blood overpowered her and all that emerged from her throat was the shadow of a sound, the faintest of gasps.

He had thought she would react as had he and that as she recovered she would grow fuddled and amorous; instead she sat up in bed, more alert than he had seen her in months and, dismissing his expressions of concern with a blithe gesture, she strolled about the room, inspecting gilt picture frames, touching the surface of a mirror as though to validate that it was her reflection she saw, caressing the sublime curves of a divan that had been owned by a Byzantine prince, and eventually coming to stand at the center of the carpet, directly between the two hemispheres, posed with her head turned to the side, her high, small breasts and full hips lacquered with gleams, her left hand touching her left shoulder, strangely demure despite her nudity. Whether due to a physical transformation caused by the blood or a perceptual distortion on Rosacher’s part, her body appeared enveloped in a white radiance, and this aura, this glow, spread from her feet across the complex patterns of her imaginary world, a puddle of light making it look as if the bloom of her beauty was the production of a luminous essence that had been imprisoned until now within the threads of the carpet.